Brand logos form a major part of your brand identity and help set the tone for your brand. Your logo, along with the product, your website, advertising, ethics, culture, tone of voice, service and values all shape and define your brand and its position.
Get this right, and customers instantly understand your brand, invest in your products, and become loyal customers for years. Get this wrong and the message becomes confusing, uncoordinated, and potentially conflicting, making it harder for the consumer to understand what your brand stands for and potentially clicks off your brand forever.
The logo name, font, and visual identity help set your tone. It’s far more than just a piece of branding that helps identify your brand over your competition. When a logo is designed in harmony with all of the other touchpoints a consumer will see or touch, the logo helps your target audience not only identify your brand but aligns with your values.
So how do you create a perfect logo?
Before you start to think of company names or scribbling logo designs, you’ll need to understand the following points. It’s only when you really understand and confirm these points that you can start to think of a brand name and logo, so that it helps bolster each of these aspects.
1. Your target market/target audience
2. Your USP
3. Your tone of voice
4. Your brand values
Once you have confirmed the above, you can start to think about possible brand names. This is often the hardest part as whatever you come up with will most probably sound wrong. Not because it is wrong but because you have not heard or seen this before and therefore it is unfamiliar. “Unfamiliar” is often more daunting than the “Familiar”
When we create brand names for our start-up clients from scratch, we always revert to a simple review of some of the major global brands and highlight that the brand name doesn’t need to “Do what it says on the tin”. For instance, if you are creating a brand for runners, the brand name doesn’t need to include the words, “run” or “jog”. It also doesn’t need to include an image of a runner. The consumer will understand the brand is for runners when they review your website and see the products and images.
Think about the market leader in computers and mobile technology “Apple”, their logo and icon have no relation to technology at all, and can you imagine the boardroom conversation when the brand name “Apple” was suggested as a possible name. It works though because it is clean, minimalist, and simple and therefore depicts their core values of creating contemporary and simple to use products.
Start to think about the other big, established brands out there, and most of these have a name that has no relation to their product at all, yet they are instantly recognizable and help form the overall brand identity.
Once you have firmed up the brand name, we suggest you check if this brand name could potentially have any issues with regard to becoming trademarked. There are several FREE trademark search websites that you can check to see if or how many other brands have a similar name and if these might be considered as being too close to your brand and confuse the consumer.
Once the company name is confirmed, you can then get into the design of the logo and icon. You will then be about to think about numerous things like;
- Fonts/Typography
- Serif or Sans-Serif
- Complimentary colours
- Tagline / Slogan
All of this again helps set the tone of the brand, so it’s important this is thought through and helps it stand out from a distance.
The logo needs to be applied to apparel so the designer that creates this needs to understand what the limitations are and make sure the logo not only represents the brand values but can be easily applied to clothing without limitation. Bold, strong logos work best here and try to avoid dainty, fine logos that can’t be read easily or limits how they might be applied to the garment.
As part of our suite of services, we help many of our Start-Up clients develop their brand name and logo. We already understand your brand values, target market, USP, and tone of voice and know what works in terms of how to apply logos to sportswear. This puts us in the best place to create a logo that fits your brand without limitations.
FREE LOGO DESIGN REVIEW
If you are starting a sportswear brand and have a brand name or logo and wanted some support with the design process and/or brand development, we offer a FREE, objective review of your logo and brand name, from our professional logo design team.
To get your free appraisal of your brand name and logo, please get in touch.
